Instantly I thought about calling Cian, then rushing to Odhran to warn him, but I reminded myself we weren’t in the middle of nowhere, not really. Although the nearest house was a good distance away, I would have considered this a residential area.
I turned, quietly walked to the front door, and placed my palms flat on the cold metal, rising up on my toes so I could look through the peephole. A woman stood on the other side, a bag hanging off her shoulder, a clipboard in one of her hands. She had a cell phone pressed against her ear, and her short, dark bob hairstyle was a little disheveled, as if she’d been running her hands through it after a long day.
I held my breath, trying to calm my racing heart as I listened to what she was saying to the person on the other side.
“Yes, this is my last house. My feet are killing me, and I’m beat, but if I don’t get my quota at getting these surveys out, Harold’s going to jump down my throat.” She exhaled, the weariness in her voice and the exhaustion on her face having a little bit of that tension leaving me. She looked totally harmless, small and petite.
She was just a solicitor, but still there was a tightness on the back of my neck that I could have probably blamed on this situation as a whole. Adryan said the house couldn’t be tracked and was protected from being found by those actively looking for it. I didn’t know how that worked, but I was done questioning things that made no sense with the world I was now thrust into.
I could hear the pipes whining again as the shower was cut off. The weird feeling wouldn’t go away, so I slowly took a step back, but the heel of my foot hit the edge of the small foyer table, knocking the vase that sat on top of it to its side.
It rolled to the floor before I could grab it, crashing to the Pergo, the sound so loud that I knew it was not only noisy enough to be heard across the house, but also on the other side of the front door.
I held my breath and took another step back, but not before I heard the woman on the other side of the door say, “Yeah, she’s inside.” Everything in me froze as I looked out the peephole again. “She’s alone. That’s clear. Maybe one Lycan in there. Tell the team to roll in quickly.”
I didn’t wait; I just took off, eating up the distance of the hallway as I ran to my room. I heard a great crash from behind me and knew the door exploded inward, into the house. I didn’t dare look over my shoulder, just ran harder, faster, but then a hard body tackled me from behind, sending me careening to the ground. My hands shot out instinctively to break my fall as I went down.
The move had my body twisting at the last moment, my head cracking on the corner of a wall, pain exploding in my skull. I cried out, landing on my shoulder, even more pain spreading throughout my entire body. Whoever attacked me from behind rolled me over so I was now on my back, but my vision was blurry, wet warmth sliding down from where I’d connected with the wall.
There was an earth-shattering, animalistic sound that coursed through the entire house. Shouting was happening all around me, orders being thrown out, but it was all garbled as it went in through my ears and swirled around in my head. My eyes were closed, and I shook my head, groaning as I lifted my hand to where I knew there was a gash. I opened my eyes and looked at my fingers, my entire hand covered in glossy red blood.
Suddenly the body was off me, the form sailing through the air. I blinked up to see Odhran standing there, water dripping off his very naked body.
“Run,” he said in a distorted, garbled voice. “Hide.” And then he was attacking the other men who seemed to come out of the woodwork.
I took in a great lungful of air and sat up, pushing my body backward, sliding across the floor until my spine connected with the wall. I was blinking, my vision still hazy, the pain in my head so strong it was hard to focus through it.
When my eyes cleared enough and all I could feel was the rush of adrenaline moving through my veins, I gasped at the sight before me.
In the entryway, Odhran fought four men dressed all in black, face masks covering their heads, only their eyes visible. Cowards, that’s what they were. The woman who’d been at the door stepped through, sidestepping the fight as if it were an everyday occurrence. The front door hung from its hinges, shards of wood scattered along the ground with broken pieces of the vase and splatters of blood.